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Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with parsnip, carrot, turnip, onions, cabbage, tomatoes, celery, and seasoned with pepper, cloves, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dilute the jellied soup stock with water in a pot.

  2. Add the chopped parsnip, carrot, turnip, onions, cabbage, tomatoes, and celery.

  3. Boil gently for 1 hour.

  4. Stir in the pepper, ground cloves, and salt.

  5. Boil for a few more minutes and serve without straining.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Jellied soup stock
Forms the savory liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole soup.
Parsnip, carrot, turnip, and onions
Release sweetness and body into the broth during the long gentle simmer.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and a fresh, tangy note that brightens the broth.
Celery
Adds a green, aromatic savoriness to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 1 hour. A gentle simmer lets the vegetables soften and release their flavor into the broth without breaking them down into cloudiness or making the liquid taste harsh. A hard, rapid boil can clump the vegetables and reduce the broth too quickly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsnip, carrot, turnip, onion, cabbage, celery, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsnip, carrot, turnip, onion, cabbage, celery, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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